1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of programming languages. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method for manipulating XML-centric objects in a native programming language environment.
2. Background Information
XML is rapidly emerging as the de-facto standard for transmitting data structures between software applications and web services. While most software applications and web services are written in modern programming languages, such as Java or C++, none of these programming languages provide native support for representing and manipulating XML. Consequently, programmers are forced to develop or adopt external software packages for representing and manipulating XML within the context of their applications and web services.
In general, external software packages are not capable of providing the host language with native support for processing XML data. As such, they represent and manipulate XML in ways that are quite different than those provided by the host language for its native data types. Most often, external software packages represent XML data using a general purpose tree abstraction and provide a tree-based API for navigating and manipulating the data (e.g., getParentNode( ), getChildNodes( ), removeChild( ), etc.). This method of accessing and manipulating data structures is cumbersome and time consuming compared to methods used for accessing and manipulating data structures native to the host programming language.
Therefore, a programming language that enables the manipulation of XML data structures with the same power and flexibility afforded native data structures is desirable.